At a time when I've been regarding anarchy as a mere
euphemism for impotence, John
Zerzan's Running on Emptiness has come across my
desk. One of the more articulate of marginalized writers on
the counterculture scene today, Zerzan encourages us to
embrace the present, our connectedness to the earth and to
nature itself. He suggests that we wean our hyper-dependence
on technology to do this for starters. While Zerzan fluently
cites examples of our current plight of apathy/ alienation
via a kind of incendiary deftness that has earned him the
'most important philosopher of our time' kind of lavish
praise from Derrick Jensen, I'm still not completely won
over when it comes to abandoning my computer and making a
dash to nature like some 21st Century Schizoid Rousseau.

However, I enjoy the challenge John poses of soberly
looking at whatever banal assumptions I may make about how
convenient and carefree technology has made my life. The
more insidious effects of PCs, the Internet, cell phones,
even call waiting, on our consciousness, on our potentials
for deeper sentience, can really only be gauged by someone
like Zerzan, who has resolutely resisted the all too
powerful seductions and promises of the digital age. Such
freedom from technological spell casting is evident in
Zerzan's obvious command of philosophy, the depth and
breadth of his research and in his ability to breathe
vitality into such stolid behemoths as dialectical State
apologist Kant, the 'Crypto-Aryan' Heidegger, the Frankfurt
Schoolboys Adorno, Walter Benjamin and others. More
important than his obvious pansophical exuberance is the
author's honest ease which is very rare in a world currently
colonized by morbid intellectuals. I suggest reading the
New York Review of Books if you need to be reminded
of just how moribund the (com)postmodern intelligentsia have
become, fingering their well worn copies of Lyotard,
Derrida, Baudrillard and other not so Free Radicals who only
serve to accelerate the breakdown of what remains of our
culture, offering nothing redeeming in return whatsoever
other than their perpetually cynical excrescences.

Zerzan doesn't hesitate to take on such Sacred Cows of
the left as Noam Chomsky, challenging the MIT professor's
views on the origins of language making capabilities in
humans as being crassly reductionistic and dehumanizing. He
also confronts Hakim 'King of the Anarchists' Bey and aptly
dissects the Temporary Autonomous Zone mystique the author
surrounds himself with and entrances his many vulnerable, if
not gullible readers with. (see the writings of Luther
Blisset for further elaboration on this.)

Running on
Emptiness is the perfect negentropic unguent to the
various pathologies at large, helping us ground out rather
than abandon our intellectual, philosophical and cultural
heritage in a way that may very well facilitate our
connection with nature instead of creating further
detachment from it. It is in this regard that I may reassess
my views on anarchy's implicate impotence and hope that
something viably intelligent comes from that wayward camp,
at least enough for me to join their cause. Zerzan makes
such a possibility more and more likely.